There is an interesting piece in Deseret News by Washington Examiner columnist and author Tim Carney on America’s declining fertility rate.
Carney spoke to several families and couples about their decisions to have, or not to have, children. An exchange between Carney and a couple from Utah—a state that, despite having the third-highest birth rate in the country, has seen its fertility rates fall below replacement level—stood out:
Nicole nods and says, “We don’t want kids.”
I ask if she means they don’t want kids right now, or they don’t ever want kids.
“Probably ever,” Isaac says.
I ask why not.
“We can’t afford it,” Nicole replies.
What costs in particular do they have in mind?
“Everything,” Isaac begins. “Health care.… But honestly, it’s just selfishness.”
I look at Nicole’s face, but she gives little reaction. Isaac continues: “I joke with Nicole, ‘some people are watching Teletubbies and cleaning up vomit, and we’re going to be drinking margaritas in Paris.’”
People like Nicole and Isaac very often say they don’t have kids because kids are expensive. They’ll cite things like health care, clothing, and education costs, and point to their own lack of financial stability. But is that really why they’re not having kids?
I don’t think so. Kids can be expensive, it’s true, and policymakers should do what they can to change that. Some families do decide against having an additional child because of the costs involved. But for many people, cost has very little to do with it. As Carney points out, poor countries outbreed wealthy countries by a sizable margin, and previous generations of Americans, who were materially much poorer, had much higher fertility rates than we do. Our grandparents got married young, had a bunch of kids, and made it work. Many today simply do not want to introduce someone or something in their lives that requires them to make that kind of sacrifice.
Carney adds that not all young adults are like Nicole and Isaac, and that those exceptions to the rule are often found in communities with higher levels of religious observance:
Americans who attend church, synagogue or mosque services at least once a week have birthrates well above 2.1. The nonreligious have birthrates well below 1.5 and falling fast. The moderately religious are in the middle.
There is a connection between a town, state, or country’s religious adherence and its fertility rates. But is the causal mechanism religious belief itself—people acting in accord with what they perceive to be a divine mandate to procreate—or something else? Carney suggests a sort of mimesis effect at work:
But the real story is probably a lot more complicated. The interaction between religion and baby-making is not as simple as mitzvahs, dogmas or church teachings. And you can tell because secular Jews in Israel have more babies than do the average European, and, as Gochnour tells me, the Catholics in America who have the most children are the Catholics in Utah. “It’s in the air,” she says.
This makes sense, in part because there isn’t a necessary connection between fecundity and religious belief, particularly Christian belief.
Pastors and priests have placed an understandable emphasis on family formation given the dramatic declines in fertility in the Christian West, but the goods of marriage and family life are only one half of the story, from a Christian perspective. Chesterton said the Church is “fiercely for having children and fiercely for not having children”—family life is good, but celibacy, in object, is better. St. Paul counsels those who are not married to remain unmarried to avoid distractions in the religious life. The Church—the New Testament, for that matter—teaches in no uncertain terms that declining to marry and start a family is objectively holier than doing so, since celibacy anticipates the eschatological reality that, in the world to come, men will neither marry not be given in marriage.
Maybe you believe that, maybe you don’t. The point is that Christianity, properly understood, is not a fertility cult. And if people were making procreative decisions solely or even primarily on the basis of their religious traditions, adherents of a religion that teaches it is better not to marry and whose Founder told His followers to “hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters” would be unlikely candidates to lead a baby boom. So there is something about religious cultures, not entirely dependent on religious doctrines, that explains the connection between belief and babies.
Carney highlights a secular man in Israel to illustrate the point:
“God has nothing to do with our children-making decisions,” a secular dad named Tsachi tells me while pushing two children in a stroller around Tel Aviv. His third child is home with his wife.
Tsachi points to Jewish history and current geopolitics as to why secular Jews in Israel average two children each, more than Catholics in Europe do. A more generalizable explanation is that religion helped create an ecosystem that is fertile for families.
What religious cultures enable, which makes even non-believers more likely to have children, is a shared sense that there exist things worth sacrificing for, things worth giving up dreams for, things worth dying for. Religious cultures are organized around rules that were not chosen by their members, that were bequeathed to the communities from sources outside the communities themselves. They incubate among their members a willingness to sacrifice for something outside of themselves.
Carney suggests that to encourage fecundity stateside, we should “build a culture that makes the sacrifice required by parents a bit smaller, and make the idea of sacrifice seem a bit less foreign.” I think the latter idea has more promise than the former.
Read the full article here
